'This guy's lost too much blood. He'll never make it.'

THE STORY SO FAR: Pfc. Daniel L. Curatola of Bethlehem survives the D-Day landing and digs in above Omaha Beach, expecting a German tank attack.

Second of two parts

That night, some guy asked me where I got hit. I said, ''I wasn't hit.'' He said, ''You've got blood on your uniform.'' I probably got it from helping the wounded guys. Either that or somebody got hit pretty close to me, and I got splashed with blood.

The tank attack never came. We slept maybe three or four hours. The next day we moved off the hill, toward the German line. We took a little town near the beach, Colleville-sur-Mer.

Two days after D-Day, a Frenchman came to our company headquarters and said he knew where the Germans laid land mines. No one else could understand him, so I had to go along as interpreter. I'd picked up French in Africa.

There was a corporal, a man with a mine detector and me, and so the three of us went along with the Frenchman and we walked for two or three miles. We were in no man's land, headed for the German lines. The corporal got anxious and said, ''Ask him how much longer.''

I asked the Frenchman and he said, ''Just about now.''

As soon as he said ''now,'' all of a sudden I felt this stuff ripping through me from the front and the back, and I went down. Shrapnel had almost torn my left arm off, and I had shrapnel in my back and right leg, and a bullet in my right side.

While I was lying there, the guy who was carrying the mine detector came over and looked down at me. His arm was bleeding. He told me the corporal was dead. The corporal had been right in front of me. By getting killed, he saved me.

I asked the guy with the mine detector, ''Where's the Frenchman?'' He said, ''He took off down the road.'' He's the only one who wasn't hit.

An aid man came and picked me up, and two of them worked on me. The one guy thought I was unconscious and he said, ''This guy's lost too much blood. He'll never make it.'' They real quick put a tourniquet on me and carried me on a blanket to a MASH unit on the beach.

A doctor started working on me, and there was an explosion and the doctors hit the dirt. The Germans were still shelling the beach. I was thinking: I made it to the beach, and I'm gonna get killed here.

The next day, they put me on a ship and sent me to England, to the small town of Kidderminster. I stayed there in a hospital. There was a whole ward full of wounded soldiers, but the doctors and nurses spent more time with me. ''How come you're always around me?'' I asked after a week. They said, ''We didn't expect you to live.''

They thought that if I lived, they'd have to amputate the leg and the arm. But they didn't have to do that.

On July 4, the doctors were checking other patients, and I saw my whole bed was filled with blood, and I called them over, and they took me right down to the operating room, no anesthesia, and started working on the leg. They found a piece of shrapnel that had moved and was causing the bleeding.

My buddy, a guy I grew up with in south Bethlehem, was in the 1st Division's 18th Infantry Regiment, Steve ''Lefty'' Hajdinyak. We were always together. We'd meet after every battle. When the African campaign was over, we got together in Algiers and had our picture taken together.

After I was wounded, they were starting to send people home. We were already overseas nearly two years and had seen a lot of combat. I wrote to Lefty and said: I hope you get home.

I got the letter back, stamped ''Deceased.''

At the time, I didn't shed a tear. We were trained to keep everything inside.

Later I found out Lefty was killed near Aachen, Germany. He was laying under a tree resting, and some German sniper spotted him.

When they brought his body back, I was going to Moravian College. I told the professor, ''I want to see him.'' He said, ''No, you can't go.'' I said, ''I'm going.''

On Lefty's casket, they had the picture that he and I took together in Algeria, only they cut me off.

A mind unlocked

For 43 years, I never talked about the war. When I came home, nobody asked me about my experiences. They just said, ''Welcome home.'' Family too.

But when my kids were small, my son asked me what I did in the war, and I told him a few things. He asked what happened on D-Day. I said, ''All I want to say is that I could walk from one end of the beach to the other just stepping on bodies.''

I finally told my story to the Bethlehem Globe-Times in 1988. After that, at night I would be back in battle in my dreams. I was seeing everything again. So I couldn't sleep for almost a week, and I finally went to the VA and told them that.

They said, ''You've locked up your mind for 43 years, and it all came out. You have post-traumatic stress.'' They gave me medication that I'm still taking.

Curatola's 1st Infantry Division battalion of 1,000 men had an estimated 900 casualties on D-Day.

After four months in the Kidderminster hospital and then physical therapy, he returned to the war zone for limited duty. He helped bury the dead during the Battle of the Bulge -- where a few men in his graves registration unit died when they moved bodies booby trapped by the Germans -- and later supervised German prisoners of war.

He has two Bronze Stars for heroism in North Africa and one for service on Sicily, a Purple Heart and other decorations.

After graduating from Moravian College in 1948, he worked at the Globe-Times and, for 31 years, in the sales department at Bethlehem Steel. He and his wife, Angelina, had a son, Daniel B., and a daughter, Dorothy Grant. Angelina died in 2003.

Curatola and his son visited Omaha Beach in 1984 for the 40th anniversary of D-Day.

''When I think back at what I went through, I'm still amazed at how, remembering that I could die any minute, I was so cool and calm. It's just the way we were trained.